Xubuntu default applications (Was: About Xubuntu Artwork)

[Pasi Lallinaho]

On 03/25/2012 01:38 PM, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On lauantai 24 maaliskuu 2012, Pasi Lallinaho wrote:
>> On 03/24/2012 08:22 PM, Ernesto Acosta wrote:
>>> # About Applications
>>>
>>> There are some applications which I think can be replaced with more
>>> light and thus do not depend on Gnome.
>>>
>>> Gcalctool can be replaced with Galculator
>>> Evince can be replaced with ePDFView
> Because Gcalctool & Evince already use Gtk3 while XFCE is still
> using Gtk2 and you don't want to have two Gtk versions until XFCE
> moves to Gtk3?

We need to support GTK3 anyway, so that isn't the main concern.

>
>>> Ristretto has greatly improved but may be replaced by Mirage.
> Mirage uses Python whereas Ristretto uses XFCE libraries.
> Why do you think it to be lighter, and lighter in which way[1]?

In my opinion, we should see where Ristretto goes in the near future. It
has gotten much love and this trend seems to continue.

>> Is there some performance comparisons for these applications?
> Based on the Xubuntu strategy document:
> 	https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/StrategyDocument
>
> Performance is considered only after the other requirements
> (integration and usability) have been met.
>
> So, unless that has changed, first the new applications:
> - stability / maturity
> - XFCE desktop/file-manager/themeing integration
> - localization coverage
> - accessibility support (if package uses Gtk that should be fine)
>
> Need to be compared to the old applications.

That's correct. While we will review the Strategy Document during the
next cycle, I don't believe this is ought to change.

> I found localization statistics for Ubuntu from here:
> 	http://people.canonical.com/~dpm/data/ubuntu-l10n/
>
> But it seems to be lacking data for the proposed applications
> and for XFCE applications:
> --------------
> stats=precise-package-stats.log;
> for pkg in epdfview evince gcalctool gcalculator mirage ristretto; do
> awk -F '|' '
> BEGIN {
> 	count=0; total=0; max=0; min=99999;
> }
> /^'$pkg' / {
> 	count+=1; total+=$7; if($7>max) max=$7; if($7<min) min=$7;
> }
> END {
> 	if (count)
> 		printf("'$pkg': %d translations\n- max %d, avg %d, min %d 
> strings\n", count, max, total/count, min);
> 	else
> 		printf("'$pkg': 0 translations\n");
> }' $stats; done
> --------------
>
> As that produces:
> --------------
> epdfview: 0 translations
> evince: 112 translations
> - max 376, avg 281, min 1 strings
> gcalctool: 107 translations
> - max 433, avg 268, min 1 strings
> gcalculator: 0 translations
> mirage: 0 translations
> ristoretto: 0 translations
> --------------
>
> When I looked more into this, gcalculator wasn't even in Ubuntu
> repos, although it seems to be in Debian...
>
>
>> The fact is that it is more work to replace than keep an application, so
>> there needs to be good rationale to change an application. That being
>> said, it is not completely unlikely that an application will be replaced
>> by another application, as long as there is somebody to write
>> comparisons, test the applications, willing to report bugs and follow-up
>> on getting them fixed and eventually, taking all this into account when
>> rationalizing the application change to the team.
> [1] Way too often people just blindly look at package dependencies, which 
> are already in Xubuntu and getting rid of them not helping performance,
> memory or disk usage a bit.
>
> And when measuring memory usage, people pointlessly look at the non-relevant
> VmSize and RSS numbers from "top" when they should be looking at the private 
> dirty + swap, private clean and PSS numbers from /proc/PID/smaps and also
> X resource consumption.
>
> gnome-system-monitor app shows most of these values.  "Memory" column
> seems to be PSS (Proportional Set Size) and Writable column private
> dirty and X resources usage is in X server memory column.
>

*snipping* the localization stuff off.

> 	- Eero

Thanks for the valuable insight, it's appreciated.

Cheers,
Pasi

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                      » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of Xubuntu and Shimmer Project       » http://shimmerproject.org/
Graphic artist, webdesigner, Ubuntu member  » http://xubuntu.org/